How To Publish a Travel Book



High Road To Tibet Sales Rank September 29



It’s great to see High Road To Tibet riding high in the Amazon Top 10 best sellers for travel and I’ve shared the good news on various blogs and forums. Some people want to know the process of publishing a book and making it available on Kindle. I’ll summarise my experience of the process here.

I started by choosing Lulu.com to publish my book “High Road To Tibet” as they were the best option at the time. Things move past in the POD world and I'm now working with CreateSpace.com to produce my second book, a collection of stories about growing up in Ireland. CreateSpace seem to be the clear leader at the present.

With Lulu.com, the cost of producing each book was about €11 so I set a selling price of €12.99. I then bought 100 copies in a bulk order which reduced the cost per book to about €6. It took well over a year but I finally managed to sell the books in local shops.

I then published the book as a Kindle download using Kindle Direct Publishing. I priced the book at USD $2.99 to qualify for the 70% royalty and to keep the price low - currently about £2.14 on Amazon.co.uk. Since I did this, sales of the Kindle version have been increasing steadily each month. KDP is great as you can see your sales in real-time. I also published it to Smashwords.com, a free eBook distribution service. While the numbers aren't as good as Amazon, they still give me a steady stream of sales on sites such as Kobo, Barnes&Noble, Apple, and Sony. There's no doubt that Kindle and these other eBook download sites are the growth area for the future.

So, what helps sales on Amazon? I've read loads of blogs about this and, combined with my own experiences, I think the following are important:

• A great book. Write the best book you can, and have it professionally edited. You owe it to yourself and your readers to send out nothing but your best.
• An engaging cover. The first time a reader sees your book on Amazon, what impression does your book cover give? If it's not interesting, the reader will just skip ahead.
• Good description. An engaging description will tell the reader what the book is about and also leave a few tantalising hints about what they could be reading if they buy the book.

Hope this will be of some help to aspiring travel authors out there.

John